Monday 19 April 2010 04.38 EDT
First published on Monday 19 April 2010 04.38 EDT

On the afternoon of 20 June 1970 a young woman clutching a child threw a small pot of red emulsion paint over Edward Heath as the newly elected prime minister entered Downing Street. As a young reporter, I was present. Or rather, I should have been. As the general dogsbody in the newsroom of London's Evening Standard, my job was to keep guard outside the big black door for just such an incident.

In those pre-terrorist days Downing Street was still an open public thoroughfare where tourists mingled with (black and white) photographers. There were no mobile phones, of course, so I had slipped away to the phone box in the Foreign Office courtyard to report to my news desk that nothing was happening. While I was away it did. Oh bugger.

Fast forward to Thursday night when the three main party leaders debated on ITV. Along with colleagues in the Guardian's team I helped write up the event for the paper, tweeted as the debate proceeded, and chaired a panel discussion for the Guardian's online election podcast. When I woke next morning I blogged the overnight reaction.

Back in 1970 the Standard, then edited by Patrick and Anna Wintour's father, Charles, still printed seven daily editions, including Saturdays: where else would you read the football results? It led on the attack. As I recall there was grainy footage on the TV evening news – all three channels. How leisurely, even quaint, it all seems compared with today's shrill, relentless 24/7 TV news channels, whose tone barely distinguishes between a pile-up on the M1 and a world war.

But there is no point in being nostalgic for a past which was pretty hopeless in its own way. A combination of market deregulation and waves of extraordinary communications innovation have forced politics – like everything else – to come to terms with it all: multichannel TV, ubiquitous mobile phones, the permanent meteor shower of emails on the all-conquering internet and myriad, perhaps transient, phenomena-like blogging and tweeting.

Politicians and journalists have struggled to keep up; they always did. Lloyd George was quick to understand the power of the new tabloid press; Stanley Baldwin and FDR got the point of radio (alas, so did Hitler); and Harold Macmillan was the first PM to seriously embrace TV. "May I say, between these four walls … " he once confided.

In the old days party HQs, scruffy, blokeish places, used to have a couple of press officers, Labour's Percy Clarke on his bike, smooth Maurice Trowbridge for the Tories, both sweeties. Today they have armies of message-peddlers and arm-twisters. Communication is instant and ceaseless. During Thursday's debate all three teams had hotlines to ITV so they could complain about camera angles. Rebuttal, pre-buttal, all sorts of buttal, they take no chances. And online citizens can challenge old media hegemony.

I was on a plane during Britain's 1987 election (it was the brief age of the fax) when a reporter with a large box – it housed his mobile phone battery – took a call from his news desk. Could he get some reaction to a speech Norman Tebbit was about to make? About to make, eh? So that's how the world is speeding up, I registered.

During the New Hampshire primaries, the following year, I watched Democrat wannabes debate their stuff on TV; much less impressive than Brown, Cameron and Clegg, they were dubbed the "seven dwarfs" by the blow-dried grandees of network TV. But you could see political advisers working the room to influence reporters. They are called "spin doctors", I reported in the Guardian – thus innocently importing a deadly concept.

Do I miss the old ways? Of course. But the new interactive, crowdsourced and accountable ways can be fun too, even the online abuse. And I no longer have the old reporter's anxiety dream of not being able to find a phone box. You can always file your story with a laptop and a Wi-Fi connection. Now I dream of power points.